Description

2000 Olga Korbut Signed Passport from The Olga Korbut Collection
- Her First! Presented here is gymnastic icon Olga Korbut's
first ever passport. Issued in July 2000, it displays numerous
stamps and images throughout, while she signed it in NM ballpoint
ink. Moderate wear exhibited throughout. Letter of provenance
from Olga Korbut.Full LOA from PSA/DNA. Full LOA
from James Spence Authentication.

The Olga Korbut Collection.

At just four feet eleven inches in height, and tipping the scales
at just over eighty pounds, one might have expected Olga Korbut to
be simply swept away in the maelstrom of politics and expectations
that swirled around the 1972 Munich Games. The Cold War had never
fully thawed at any international summit of the world's greatest
athletes, and this 1972 edition was devastated by the horrors of
the terrorist attack upon the Israeli team at the Olympic Village.
But it was at these Games, under those most challenging conditions,
that Korbut supplied a gymnastics performance of pure mastery and
joy, beginning a global love affair with "The Sparrow from Minsk,"
who single-handedly upended the stereotype of the Soviet athlete as
a stone-faced automaton.

The world welcomed her back to the sport's brightest spotlight four
years later in Montreal, where she was identified as the best hope
to throw a leash around the rising star of Romanian wunderkind
Nadia Comaneci, but injury limited the full breadth of Korbut's
brilliance, restricting her medal haul to a team Gold and personal
Silver.

This auction will present the tangible evidence of Korbut's elite
achievement-three Gold and two Silver medals earned at the Olympic
Games of Munich and Montreal--as well as dozens of other relics of
her age of dominance (her fourth Gold Medal--1972 Balance Beam--was
stolen from a Moscow museum). But her greatest legacy cannot be
measured by the inanimate. After the 1972 Games, Korbut was invited
to visit Richard Nixon at the White House, and she later reported
that, "He told me that my performance in Munich did more for
reducing the political tension during the Cold War between our two
countries than the embassies were able to do in five
years."

Today, at age sixty-one, Korbut parts with the mementos of her
youthful glory because the thing she values most is always with
her. There is hardly a gymnast alive who doesn't credit this tiny
force of nature for the explosion of the sport's popularity on a
global level, for establishing gymnastics as the most anticipated
competition of the Summer Games. Heritage Auctions is privileged
and proud for the opportunity in bringing this historic collection
to the collecting world, each lot joined by a signed letter of
provenance from Ms. Korbut herself.

Auction Info

Auction Dates

May, 2018

17th-18thThursday-Friday

Internet/Mail Bids: 4

Lot Tracking Activity: N/A

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Buyer's Premium per Lot:
20% of the successful bid (minimum $14) per lot.